To enjoy Onoria’s conversation was to confess to a taste for Punch and Judy Shows; and, as time hardened Onoria’s method of attack, Little Ticklington grew tired of her bludgeoning. The men who had delighted in Onoria’s prowess had married, and with years of domesticity their delight in prowess had gradually faded out, or been transferred to the actions of their offspring. Onoria disliked other people’s children and very wisely told them so. It relieved her of many tiresome obligations, but among them it relieved her of the presence of the parents. She had had to throw away the apple with the core. Onoria had fewer and fewer objects for her affection. Prendergast had changed from being an elderly and morose Pug, into being very old and resentful of all claims upon his attention except in the shape of well chopped-up food. He liked the results of tenderness without its expression. Peter Gubbins was just as faithful, but if you have been faddy and aggravating as a young man, you will infallibly become eccentric and exasperating when youth has left you. Peter Gubbins was unaware that youth had left him; he sometimes had misgivings about Time and Onoria’s figure. Her complexion had always been a little hard and weather beaten, but her hair retained its colour and her voice its piercing quality; besides Onoria was three years older than Peter. He knew Onoria was no longer young, but she was still very, very powerful. Neither of them had had a severe illness, a great sorrow, or an unexpected good fortune; and it is very easy to believe that you have remained the same if everything else has. Peter wrote less poetry and rather more articles, and he grew the finest sweet peas in the neighbourhood. There was one event which might have awakened Peter to the lapse of years if it had not come on almost as gradually as his success with the sweet peas. This was the introduction of Elsie; but she had been introduced before he could connect change with her, or receive the challenge to his personality which a young girl’s friendship will cause the least self-conscious of men. Elsie had not made friends with Peter at first, but after two or three years of speechless, tepid watchfulness upon both sides, a bond had been secretly and invisibly formed between them. They could not have told why it was secret and they hardly knew that it was a bond; they only knew that in each other’s society there was an absence of insistent racket, a blissful sense of not being at their best and liveliest, and not needing to be, which took the place of active pleasure. There were very few of these harmonious moments. Usually Onoria was there, and they met under her eyes and with the volleyings of her wit, and the tremendous onslaught of her theories, thick upon them.